Dr. Metablog

Regular readers of this blague are well aware that I have repeatedly indulged my bemusement at the names of extinct or obsolescent horsedrawn conveyances. My point is that modern readers, who know precisely what is signified  — in design, in metal, rubber and plastic, and especially in social value — by such words as Jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, know just about zip about "fly," "trap," "landau," "chaise," "phaeton," "cabriolet," "sulky," "surrey," "curricle," "gig," "hansom," "buggy," "four-wheeler," "spring-van," "berlin," "barouche," "britchka," "troika," "wurt," "tandem," "caleche," "tilbury," "dog-cart," "wagonette," "go-cart," "victoria," "brougham," "diligence," "clarence" or "post-chaise."  If we notice these words at all, we tend to savor them as archaic Victorian music rather than to identify and evaluate them as specific forms of transportation.

Return with us now to the unthrilling 1950s, before pre-marital cohabitation became ordinary. In those days, automobiles reeked of sex. Indeed, I can remember that one sociologist described them as "portable bedrooms" — a witticism that produced profound envy in those of us who came from automobile-less families.  While I knew that Nashes and Studebakers and big ol' DeSotos could serve as mobile boudoirs, I must confess that I had never suspected that horsedrawn vehicles could perform the same function. The eye-opener came by way of some sly and wicked goings-on in Flaubert's Madame Bovary.  Here's the situation: Emma has been wooed for a hundred or so pages by her young admirer, Leon. They are both eager to consummate their affair, but there's no convenient venue. Taking fate into his hands, Leon "pushes" Emma into a cab. "'Where to, Monsieur?' asked the cab driver. 'Wherever you'd like,' said Leon."  And then Flaubert describes the route around Rouen taken by coachman, cab, and lovers. He give us a page and a half of paragraphs like this one:  "The coach promptly began to move again, passing through Saint-Sever, along the Quai des Corandiers and the Quai aux Meules, over the bridge once more, through the Place du Champ-de-Mars and behind the gardens of the Home for the Elderly, where, in the sunshine, old men clad in black jackets stroll up and down a terrace green with ivy. It climbed up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, traveled along the Boulevard Cauchoise, then right over Mont-Riboudet as far as the hill at Deville."  At discreet intervals, Flaubert interrupts the narrative: "'Keep going," cried a voice from inside…."  "'Keep going!' shouted the voice, even more furiously…."  "The coachman could not understand what rage for locomotion could be compelling this pair never to stop." Eventually, the cab "drew up in an alley near the Beauvoisine district, and a woman stepped out, walking off with her veil lowered, never looking back."

Nineteenth-century writers were not allowed to be explicit about sexual events, so they had to adopt various circumlocutions and codes. They lacked the freedom of both earlier (Fielding, said Thackeray, "was the last of our writers who drew a man") and later (post-Joyce) novelists. To write frankly about the act of intercourse was absolutely taboo.  Despite the obstacles, Flaubert does a excellent job of suggesting both the duration, the energy and the jouissance that Emma and Leon experience while their coach was "tossing about like a ship."

I suspect that Flaubert's readers had little trouble comprehending what is meant by the passengers' sudden "rage for locomotion."

In The Lake of the Woods sold well and was much adulated in 1994. It's been on my reading list for a long time, and I've finally gotten around to it. In plot, it's uncannily reminiscent of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (on which I reported some months ago). Wilson's novel is post-WWII; O'Brien's is post-Vietnam. In each novel, the semi-autobiographical ex-soldier protagonist has committed unspeakable acts that he conceals from his loving wife; his silence embitters the marriage. In both books, the central figure embarks an ambitious career, but he is haunted by his past. Eventually, by force of circumstance, closeted history re-emerges and a crisis is precipitated. Deliberate and willed amnesia is the common theme of both books — in fact, neither the characters nor their creators can bring themselves to confront the past except obliquely.     

I've come to In The Lake of the Woods thirteen years too late. I'm sure that it had immediacy and power when it was fresh and new, but now it seems contrived and obvious. The machinery of the novel  — multiple interlocking flashbacks, third-person commentary, authorial interjections, etc. — may have worked in 1994, but is now marvelously self-conscious and ostentatiously "literary." I know that Vietnam was a trauma for all concerned and I respect O'Brien's sincerity and pain. I just wish In the Lake of the Woods weren't so thin and pseudo-mysterious and evasive.

Is there a great novel of Americans in Vietnam or is it still waiting to be written?  It was a particularly ugly war and it was the watershed experience for people of my particular generation. Do we have a War and Peace?

Question:  How many masterpieces would it take to compensate for the disaster?  Answer:  There isn't enough paper.     

I remember exactly when I first heard of James Agee's A Death in the Family. It was in Ithaca in 1958. The late Edward Ruhe, who was then a young instructor in English, stopped me on the street and asked if I had read it. He said I must, and, obedient lad that I was, I immediately purchased a copy. I can't remember much from my fifty-years-ago reading, except that I was put off by the novel's long italicized flashbacks and by what I regarded as its excessively intimate tone, which I then judged to be sentimental and false. But I've now re-read the novel. It's authentic, it's emotional, and it's so very American. I'm very glad to have had a chance to revise my earlier opinion. Perhaps I was too young. It's curious that I didn't connect Agee to the autobiographical poets that I was then reading, for the ground that Agee covers was then being explored by Lowell and Snodgrass and Roethke and of course by Sylvia Plath. 

It's a novel not only about death (it's told through the observing eyes of Rufus Follet, the six-year-old whose father dies in an automobile accident) but about the details of American life. There's very little in the way of plot, but Knoxville in 1915 is wonderfully evoked, mostly through concrete images. It's very much a novel of things. Perhaps I'm especially conscious of this technique because I've been re-reading Flaubert. But in Flaubert's novels, almost every object is laden with satirical significance (which is also the case — to choose an American parallel — in the novels of Mark Twain). Agee, however, loves the objects that he describes. Although there's puzzlement and mystery, there's not an ounce of satire or cynicism anywhere in A Death in the Family. Rufus Follet and Huck Finn — it's not as unlikely a pairing as it might at first seem.

The facilitator of Agee's achievement is James Joyce. A Death in the Family could not have been written without the precedent of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But it's an American not an Irish portrait — not as complex or as original, but fully as real as Joyce's. If an extraterrestrial visiting our lovely green planet wanted to understand the difference between Europe and America, he couldn't do better than read Portrait and A Death in the Family side by side. 

The most glorious fictions that I've read in many years are late writings by two nineteenth-century masters. The first is Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murad; the second, Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart. Hadji Murad (published posthumously in 1912) is a novella on the subject of war and its follies. A Simple Heart (1877) is a short story about an exploited servant woman who finds a bit of beauty in an ugly world. They're both absolutely transcendent stories — "beyond beyond," as Shakespeare says. 

April 2.  Additional recommendations. I've now read three "detective" novels by Leonardo Sciascia. They are all superior creations, although their open-endedness might be disappointing to people who expect that mysteries must be resolved and that criminals should be brought to justice. They're not genre fiction; they're writings that cleverly expand and question the crime genre. The novels:  he Day of the Owl  (1961), To Each His Own (1966), Equal Danger (1971), — all reprinted in attractive, reader-friendly editions by New York Review Books. I'll be looking for more Sciascia on the library shelves. Also, You Know Me All, by Ring Lardner, an excellent baseball novel first published in 1916. It holds up well, although the humor leans heavily on "country bumpkin" stereotypes. 

A year or so ago, I confessed that when I read novels that take place in pre-internal combustion days, I don't clearly distinguish among various horsedrawn conveyances — they're all coaches to me. I have no mental image of "fly," "trap," "landau," "chaise," "phaeton," "cabriolet," "sulky," "surrey," "curricle," "gig," "hansom," "buggy," "four-wheeler," or "spring-van."  The pictorial or social resonance of these colorful names is something to which I'm pretty much tone-deaf. 

I was therefore amused when just yesterday I happened upon the following passage in Flaubert's Sentimental Education (completed in 1869 but set in the 1840s).  Frederic and Rosanette attend the horse races in a "berlin."  Stuck in traffic, they find themselves surrounded by a crestomathy of carriages: "barouches, britchkas, wurts, tandems, tilburies, dog-carts, covered wagonnettes with leather curtains full of singing workmen out on the spree, and go-carts carefully driven by fathers of families.  There were crowded victorias in which some young man would be sitting on the feet of other passengers, with his legs dangling over the side. Big broughams with cloth-covered seats carried dozing dowagers; and occasionally a magnificent high-stepper went by, drawing a post-chaise as simple and smart as a dandy's tail-coat."

I'm positive that Flaubert chose his words carefully and I'm equally sure that he had no premonition that his vocabulary would be obsolescent in just fifty years and incomprehensible in a hundred.

Every contemporary novelist knows that it matters whether his hero arrives in a Jeep or a Jaguar or a jalopy. If his book will be read in a later century, extinct and quaint words such as "pickup," "step-van," "SUV," "Buick," "station wagon," "jeep," "hummer," "flat-bed," and "Subaru" will be annotated with copious scholarly footnotes. And the words to songs as well. How much scholarship and how many sentences will it take to fully explicate "We'll have fun, fun, fun/ Until Daddy takes the T-bird away?"   

A few of us were in a coffee shop talking about Ted Haggard, Darlene Bishop and other right-wing Christianistas. One of the guys thought that I could gain some perspective and also stoke my outrage by reading Harold Frederic's 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware. I recognized the title — it had appeared on reading lists when I was a student in the 1950s and 1960s  — but I'd never turned a single page. Well, better late than never; Theron Ware is a truly splendid book. 

Here's a sample of its satirical spirit. Youthful, ignorant Theron Ware meets the governing elders when he arrives to take up his ministry at the Octavius Methodist Church: 

"We are a plain sort o'folks up in these parts," said Brother Pierce….  We walk here… in a meek and humble spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here.  Your wife'd better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday."

It's a wonderful speech, especially that last oppressive sentence, set without pause or punctuation against flimsy pretenses to meekness. Harold Frederic leaves us in no doubt that Brother Pierce and his Methodist co-religionists worship only at the altars of joylessness and petty tyranny. Theron Ware would like to rebel against these sour Puritanisms, but he's devoid of the necessary intellectual resources. He's backwoods ignorant. He does after a while acquire and read Renan's Life of Jesus and for a few chapters it seems as though he's going to tread the familiar nineteenth-century path from narrow sectarianism toward a less restrictive spirituality. But the author has many surprises in store. Ware encounters Father Forbes, an intelligent, informed and (gasp!) Roman Catholic priest and he also develops a painful crush on a dashing rich free-spirited young and (horrors!) Irish-American beauty named Celia Madden. Ware is unable to grasp that these two sophisticates treat him not as an equal, but as a kind of mascot puppy. Wonderful and embarrassing complications ensue. 

Frederic creates some full and rich and modern characters. Father Forbes is a 1890s decadent with roots in Pater and perhaps even in Huysmans, while Sister Soulsby is a practical, energetic no-nonsense entrepreneur whose trade just happens to be promoting Methodism. Most interesting of all is Celia Madden, who plays Chopin and admires George Sand, and who is as up-to-the-moment as anyone in The Woman Who Did (and who would have been perfectly at home discussing aesthetics in Bloomsbury). Theron Ware's encounters with her are painfully amusing. It's as if Frank Merriwell had somehow blundered into Madam Merle's drawing-room.

The town of Octavius is modeled on Utica, New York, where Harold Frederic was born and spent his young manhood. Utica is a place I know very well, but I don't believe I've ever come across a Frederic monument or a "Harold Frederic lived here" plaque. Perhaps the city fathers aren't eager to remind us that Utica is portrayed as gossipy, narrow, ignorant, and exceedingly philistine.   

Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1947) is a loathsome novel. It makes me gag to remember that it was wildly popular in the P.S. 217 schoolyard — passed from hand to hand in lurid 25-cent paperback editions. Spillane's hero, the crudely-monikered private investigator Mike Hammer, lives in a world in which guns are "rods," bullets are "slugs," cars are "heaps," a policeman is a "flatfoot," gays are "queers" and "pansies," and people of any color other than white are "jigs," "bogies," or "darkies." His is a horrible, amoral universe of bigotry and violence. Mike Hammer, nominally an officer of the law, makes no effort to bring criminals to justice — he prefers to kill them. "I'm going to enjoy putting a bullet into that crazy son of a bitch more than I enjoy eating. I'd sooner work him over with a knife first." He's a sadistic vigilante who beats up suspects and bystanders indifferently: "my fist went in up to the wrist in his stomach."

Charlotte Manning, the beautiful uptown "dame" whom he thinks he loves, tells him what he wants to hear (and what the novel endorses) — that he's a "a real man — no inhibitions." Of course, he doesn't go to bed with Charlotte Manning — he only traffics with women who are those he derides as "nymphos." At the climax of the novel, Hammer discovers — a surprise to no one but himself! — that the killer for whom he's searching is Charlotte herself. As he fingers his .45 caliber pistol, she slowly disrobes. When she's entirely naked, Hammer shoots her in the stomach. "'H-how could you,' she gasps. Hammer: "It was easy." Was it difficult, even in 1953, to understand such perverse, misogynistic symbolism?

Mickey Spillane left his native Brooklyn to go to serve as a soldier; what a shame that he returned as a fascist.

For all I know, I might have read I, the Jury during the same week that I read John R. Tunis's The Kid from Tompkinsville. As degraded as is the one novel, so the other is otherworldly and pure. The "kid" is Roy Tucker, a simple country boy who tries out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, wins a place on the team, and is pitching shutout after shutout when he trips in the shower and injures his throwing arm.  A few weeks later, mirabile dictu, he returns as an outfielder and leads his team to a pennant with his hitting. It's a heckuva lot of drama for one short season, but Tunis makes it credible  — well, at least, it seemed credible to youthful me back in 1953.

Tunis takes his baseball seriously and he never patronizes his young readership. Like most of Tunis's novels (The Kid Comes Back, Young Razzle, Iron Duke), all of which I swallowed in single gulps, The Kid from Tompkinsville extols the virtues of integrity, effort, and teamwork. Was I astute enough to notice that there was no drinking, no staying out late, and not a hint of desire for women in Roy Tucker's life? I don't believe I was.   

While nasty old Mike Hammer asked us to wallow in a swinish world, upstanding Roy Tucker lifted us from the mire. There could hardly be a better illustration of Shakespeare's observation that "the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." I'd like to believe that Tunis was a greater influence on me (as he was certainly a greater source of pleasure) than Spillane — even though, as I recently discovered, Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane) was a fellow graduate of "good-and-ill-together" Erasmus Hall High School.